Holiday-themed episodes were never part of Fringe’s DNA. Time-traveling men in black, doppelgängers from another universe, and bringing Leonard Nimoy out of retirement were integral to forming the identity of this sci-fi series. It’s a shame too, Fringe could have had some fun taking on holidays. Some cases were terrifying enough to be set on or around the Halloween season: melting skin, exploding heads, and squid-like creatures that burst out of the mouth, to name a few. Fringe loved making the impossible possible, but it usually stayed away from celebrating the holidays, except for an episode in Season 1.
Holiday TV episodes might go down the feel-good route — or they could bring in a spookier vibe when a killer Santa is on the loose in Tales from the Crypt and Pagan monsters seek victims in Supernatural. As for when Fringe decided to get into the Yuletide spirit, it weaponized the innocence of Christmas lights and put a spin on the ghosts of A Christmas Carol. The episode also had an important place in Season 1 that showed the direction it was going in, from being considered “decent” to becoming “great.” Sci-fi weirdness doesn’t take a holiday, not on Fringe.
A Kidnapping Gets a Sci-Fi Twist on ‘Fringe’
Season 1’s “The Equation” begins on a stormy night with a father making the mistake of helping a stranger. Andrew Stockton (Adam Grupper) drives through a downpour, with his young son Ben (Charlie Tahan) in the backseat, who is busy trying to complete a piano composition that he can’t stop obsessing over. On the side of the dark road, Andrew notices a young woman (Gillian Jacobs) flagging him down. Her car has broken down and Andrew offers to help while a tow truck is on its way. He looks at the engine, becoming hypnotized by a flashing sequence of circled lights: green, green, green, red. When Andrew reawakens, the woman and her car are gone, along with his son Ben. The case-of-the-week is locked in place, and it requires a special team to investigate.
It’s brought to the attention of the Fringe Division, a unit of the FBI that looks into inexplicable cases revolving around Fringe science. Special Agent Phillip Broyles (Lance Reddick) notices a connection between the kidnapping of Ben and similar abductions in the past that were never solved. There is the same description of the woman and the use of green-red flashing lights, except, academics with highly-specialized backgrounds had been kidnapped. Never a child. Broyles quickly gets the Fringe Division up to speed; its members, FBI agent Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv), Dr. Walter Bishop (John Noble), and his son Peter (Joshua Jackson), have no time to waste. The previous victims were returned but left with permanent brain damage. Walter knows a thing about brain damage, as the certified mad scientist of the Fringe team, and he seems to know vital information about the flashing lights thanks to an old experiment.
‘Fringe’ Turns Christmas Lights Into a Weapon
It’s not unusual to see iconic symbols becoming dangerous when the December holiday comes around in darker stories. In Bob’s Burgers, the family is chased by an ominous candy cane-shaped truck. If those green-red lights in Fringe remind you of Christmas, that’s not by mistake. String lights have been used before in more brutal, hands-on methods. In slasher movies, Silent Night, Deadly Night, and Black Christmas, a killer rips away the decorative lights to strangle their victims until they gasp their last breath — or their neck snaps, whichever happens first. Coming up with another use, Fringe turns Christmas lights into a weapon with the flashing sequence in the kidnapper’s car that puts Andrew into a trance. That detail in the case triggers some clarity in Walter’s foggy mind. Decades ago, he was tasked with creating a technique to help an advertising agency manipulate consumers into buying their products. He was never successful in avoiding nauseous side effects, but someone has perfected the technology.
The green and red colors are important too, and not just in Fringe. Director Wes Craven once explained in the retrospective documentary, Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy, why Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) wore his famous red and green sweater. Craven read how those two colors were, “very difficult for the eye to see side by side,” and he added, “so I literally made him into, sort of, a painful optical effect.” Fringe plays with this idea with a different kind of optical effect. Walter’s original experiment didn’t focus on specific colors. The successful device can now steal time by forcing a person into a “hypnagogic trance,” or the state of drowsiness in between being awake and asleep. At Walter’s lab in the basement of Harvard University, the team soon gets bombarded by Walter’s sudden Christmas spirit as he tries to remember one more reason the flashing lights seem familiar to him. And it works.
Walter Bishop Uses Holiday Songs To Investigate This ‘Fringe’ Abduction
Walter Bishop sings “Jingle Bells” until the lyrics “dashing through the snow” give him the name he was looking for. Dashiell Kim (Randall Duk Kim) was a friend and fellow patient of St. Claire’s, the mental hospital where Walter spent decades until he was released in the pilot under the care of Peter. Dashiell had mentioned the green-red lights in “a story about a woman who put him to sleep with a Christmas tree and then took him away.” The same woman who abducted Ben had taken Dashiell to solve a mathematical equation that he was obsessing over. He couldn’t figure it out, and when he was eventually freed, the brain damage he suffered caused him to brutally kill his wife and he was incarcerated at St. Claire’s.
The case begins to make sense as Peter and Walter realize the equation Dashiell couldn’t finish is the mathematical equivalent to the piano composition Ben was hyper-focused on. Viewers get to hear it. “The Equation” is a haunting score on Fringe, created by composer Chad Seiter, and it could make for an alternative pick out of the gothic choir songs that are popular during the Yuletide season. A problem stands in the way of learning anything else from Dashiell to help rescue Ben. The Fringe team can only get access to the man if Walter meets with him, meaning he needs to step back into St. Claire’s. To save the boy, Walter agrees to the terms, even if it terrifies him. The episode goes into dark places that can remind audiences of a Christmas classic during this journey back to St. Claire’s, and in seeing how far the abductor will go to get what she wants.
Gillian Jacobs Is a Mysterious Villain in “The Equation”
In an unknown location, down an industrial hall, Ben is in a room strapped to a machine with a different version of the green-red lights and put into a trance. In the role of his abductor, Gillian Jacobs is nothing like Britta on Community or Tiffany in the stressful Christmas episode of The Bear. Jacobs’ villain, Joanne Ostler, is a ruthless MIT neurologist who has been presumed dead. Working under mysterious orders, Joanne uses her knowledge to get her abductees to solve a seemingly impossible equation, and Ben is the closest to completing it. While “The Equation” isn’t as overtly festive as other holiday TV episodes, it does share a reckoning with the past that resembles the famous Charles Dickens novel, A Christmas Carol.
Ben is given a second chance to be with his recently deceased mom, thanks to Fringe science in the tech Joanne has wired him to. In a hypnagogic trance, Ben can spend time with his mother, as long as he continues working on the Equation. Although the episode doesn’t make explicit references to Dickens’ fable, Ben is essentially forced into revisiting a loved one from the past, like Ebenezer Scrooge. But Joanne Ostler is not Ben’s Ghost of Christmas Past. Her actions are a form of vicious manipulation. When the boy loses concentration, Joanne lets his mother slowly deteriorate in front of his eyes, a bloody gash resurfacing on her face from the car accident she died in. Ben hasn’t done anything to warrant experiencing this “haunting,” nor is it done to better himself, like with Scrooge. And the boy isn’t the only one forced to face his past.
There are inner demons that Walter must grapple with as he re-enters the mental hospital. A bad reaction from an unstable Dashiell leads to Walter being forced to stay overnight at St. Claire’s. A temporary patient once more, he fears how cruel and egotistical his old self was, and hallucinates his double, who sits on the bed to mock him. Unlike Ben, Walter’s past sins have led him to self-reflect and redeem himself. Returning to St. Claire’s was a selfless act. By the next day, Walter learns a key clue that helps Olivia track down Ben. The boy is saved, but Joanne escapes, using the green and red lights to freeze Olivia in place. As Season 1 became stronger with its storytelling, it would soon be able to stand apart from another sci-fi series it was often compared to.
‘The X-Files’ and ‘Fringe’ Had Very Different Holiday Episodes
The blend of procedural and sci-fi in Fringe, with a special FBI unit investigating strange mysteries, owes plenty to the beloved, influential ’90s show The X-Files. But the two are very different, and how they approach their holiday episodes is one example. The X-Files has FBI agents Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) and Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) looking into monster-of-the-week cases or episodes involving an overarching alien mythology; the writing could be zany or horrifying, and it wasn’t afraid of going fully into the supernatural/fantasy. Season 5’s “Christmas Carol” dives into the show’s larger alien conspiracy and the consequences of Scully’s abduction from a few years earlier. Season 6’s “How the Ghosts Stole Christmas” left out aliens, but retains the haunting of the past.
Scully and Mulder get trapped in a haunted house with mischievous ghosts (Ed Asner and Lily Tomlin) who attempt to push the agents into killing each other. The goofy fun becomes disturbing in the episode’s final minutes as Bing Crosby’s “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” plays throughout the haunted house while the agents bleed out from gunshot wounds, before realizing the ghosts have manipulated their sense of reality. The ghosts in “The Equation” are hallucinations caused by Walter’s fractured mind or the technology of a neurologist-turned-kidnapper, as Fringe sticks to its brand of sci-fi that prefers to keep a grip on reality, with science or technology playing a role in the cases. “The Equation” may not be one of the best episodes, but it saw the main trio continue to grow into complex, interesting characters.
‘Fringe’ Made a Christmas-Themed Recap for the Fans
When Olivia finds Ben, she gets into a gritty brawl with Joanne, a scene that becomes Olivia’s first big fight scene, starting Anna Torv’s run of being a badass in the role. On the Peter and Walter side of things, the father and son continue healing their estrangement when Peter lets Walter know he’s proud of his bravery in returning to St. Claire’s. Their relationship became the show’s most important element, full of emotional scenes that gave Fringe its heart. “The Equation” is mostly a filler episode that builds onto its core leads until the ending reveals Joanne’s motives for her abductions belong to a larger plan that is happening in the shadows. The Christmas spirit might be otherwise downplayed, besides the colored lights, but there was a special gift for fans as the winter hiatus arrived in Season 1, and a recap of the first ten episodes was released that had Walter recite a Fringe-themed version of “A Visit from St. Nicholas.”
Although the sci-fi series didn’t do other holiday episodes following Season 1, “The Equation” is how Fringe celebrated the Christmas season in its own peculiar way. The recap got more into the holiday spirit when it had Walter wish everyone, “Merry Fringemas to all and to all a Fringe Night,” followed by an image of Walter’s lab pet, Gene the cow, poking her head out of a wreath and wearing a Santa hat. Instead of listening to “Carol of the Bells” or “Silent Night,” the haunting piano piece in Fringe‘s “The Equation” should be the one playing as the Yule log crackles nearby. Just don’t stare over at the malfunctioning lights on the Christmas tree as they blink — green, green, green, red.
An F.B.I. agent is forced to work with an institutionalized scientist and his son in order to rationalize a brewing storm of unexplained phenomena.
- Release Date
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September 9, 2008
- Creator
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- Seasons
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5
Fringe is available to stream on Max.
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